Trap! for Android

At a Glance

Like many of the best puzzle games, Trap! is both simple and highly addictive. It requires quick thinking, fast reflexes, and a steady hand.

Like many of the best puzzle games, Trap! is both simple and highly addictive. It requires quick thinking, fast reflexes, and a steady hand.

The object is to claim as much screen real-estate as possible by drawing lines with your finger. Each line traps moving balls in smaller sections, but If a ball touches your line while it's being drawn, the line breaks, and you lose a life. To move on to the next level, you must capture 75 percent (or more) of the screen.

Each successive level adds another ball to the equation, thus making it more difficult to draw your lines. You can also try drawing multiple lines at the same time to close areas off even faster. As long as you don’t power off your phone, you can close out of the game and come back to it later; the game automatically saves your progress.

In the game’s Normal Mode, there are a bunch of bonuses you can collect: extra lives, turbo boosts (which allow you to draw lines super-fast), time freezes, ghost balls, and various points bonuses. You can also opt to try Skill Mode, in which there are no special items. However, in Skill Mode, you get an additional life and a turbo boost after every level you complete, and you can earn more points via a cumulative area bonus.

You can also choose to play Time Challenge mode (which works with Normal and Skill modes). Time Challenge uses an hourglass instead of lives. You get more sand in your hourglass for every level you complete (or for every extra life you collect, if you’re playing in normal mode).

The graphics in this game are not the big draw, to say the least. There’s no eye-candy at all, but the gameplay is so addictive that you won’t care. The game runs quite smoothly on Android 2.1 and up, but it lags occasionally on older Android versions. Also, sometimes when you’re trying to draw a vertical line, it annoyingly draws a horizontal line (and vice versa), which may cost you a life. Other than that, though, it’s a pretty perfect game.

Put simply, this game is a must-have. Be careful, though: like the name of the game implies, it might ensnare large chunks of your free time.